


The Flame and the Night: A Bedtime Story

by WingFeathers



Category: DCU, DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Bonding, But using New52/Rebirth Nightwing Legend, CIty mouse country mouse, Clark Kent is a Storyteller, Contemplation of the Universe, Continuity What Continuity, Cycles of Destruction and Rebirth, Dick Grayson is Robin, Dick Grayson is a Superman Fanboy, Gen, Kryptonian Culture & Customs, Kryptonian mythology, Ma and Pa Kent are Alive, Nightwing and Flamebird, Stargazing, UNCLE CLARK
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-15
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-23 02:50:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14322936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingFeathers/pseuds/WingFeathers
Summary: Dick's thrilled to stay with the Kents, but they go to bed far too early for him to sleep. It turns out to be a job for Superman, who shows Dick the Kansas night sky and tells him a story from Krypton––a story about two gods, called Nightwing and Flamebird.He’d seen stars before.  Lots of stars, even.  But from this rooftop where he sat with Clark, he could see the whole galaxy.  Theuniverse.It was all sobig.“Do you ever get lost in it all?” he asked.(Set in continuity withUnder the Shadow of Your Wingsfics and repeated inGrounded, but this version stands alone for those not interested in the multi-chapter work.)





	The Flame and the Night: A Bedtime Story

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, I'm mixing up continuities a little bit here by having the Kents alive past Superman's debut but using the New 52/Rebirth version of the Nightwing legend, so let's say it's Rebirth continuity but with the pre-Flashpoint Robin timeline and Kent timeline restored. This version of the legend resonated well while still feeling properly mythological, and I actually quite like the idea of Kryptonians having a sense of geological cyclical destruction and rebirth, only to have the final destruction really be the end of it all.
> 
> This is set in continuity with _Taking Flight_ , but it is a stand-alone scene. It has also inspired a bigger story that I'm now working on, of Dick's full Midwestern adventure. I wanted to post this, though, in case the bigger piece takes a while to come together, or in case I have to reduce this scene for the full story.

Three hours after the Kents said goodnight, Dick began to wonder if being sent to Smallville was actually a punishment in disguise. He’d been so excited to come, thinking of the trip as a special treat. And it had been, throughout dinner and dessert, getting to know the kindly couple that had raised Superman. But going to bed before nine o’clock was a unique kind of torture.

He’d tried sleeping, but that’d been impossible. He’d tried exercising, but the creaking floorboards threatened to wake his hosts. He’d even tried sneaking downstairs and into the fields to run off his energy, but he’d turned back about ten minutes in, creeped out by the unnerving _quiet_ of it all. So he lay on his bed, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling and imagining what was happening on the streets of Gotham.

Suddenly, a thump from above broke the silence. There was a good chance it was nothing at all. But there was also a chance that it was Clark come to check on him. Either way, investigating the source of it was at least _something_ to do. Dick found purchase in the windowsill and hoisted himself up until he reached the edge of the roof. Bare hands and bare feet were not the best for climbing, but he pulled himself up toward the roof, brought his head over, and—

“Hiya, Dick,” said Clark, right in his face.

Dick recoiled in shock and lost his grip. In a flash, though, a hand caught his and hauled him back up, dropping him lightly onto the roof.

“Didn’t mean to scare ya.”

“I was _surprised_ , not scared,” muttered Dick, straightening out his pajama pants. “I _knew_ you were up here.”

Clark chuckled. “You sound like _him_.”

Dick scrunched his nose and climbed higher. 

“So. How’s Smallville treating you?”

“Good,” Dick answered. “Your parents are really nice—they turn in early, though.”

“When Pa gets you up at dawn tomorrow, you’ll wish you had, too. But then you’d’ve missed _this_.” Clark leaned back, looking up at the sky.

As much as Batman and Robin were creatures of night, two years in Gotham had made Dick forget what a real night sky should look like. Not that he didn’t know on some level, if he thought hard enough about it. He remembered rural stops where the stars were too many to count, but they were distant memories. Instead, he’d become adjusted to the silhouettes of skyscrapers against a reddish haze, the man-made light reflected by the fog that clung around Gotham City. His mind had tricked him into thinking that the stars visible from an upstate camping trip were all there were to see.

But outside of Smallville, far from any city, there was no patch of sky without stars, no darkness not dappled in twinkling points of light. The sky was almost _bright_ , and yet far darker than in Gotham. There was no depth to the Gotham night, only a blanket just dark enough to bring out the worst in people. Here, though, the space in between the stars seemed to go on forever, deep into the furthest reaches of the universe. Except it didn’t _seem_. It _did_ go on forever. And the Milky Way, spread across it all, beckoned close like a cloud made of brilliant light. It stretched out and out and out, and no building or hill or tree-line blocked any of it. 

He’d seen stars before. _Lots_ of stars, even. But from this rooftop where he sat with Clark, he could see the whole galaxy. The _universe_. 

It was all so _big_.

“Do you ever get lost in it all?” he asked.

“Not when I’m here,” Clark said. Like it was that simple. “Close your eyes.”

Dick was used to exercises like this with Bruce, honing his mindful awareness. He did as he was told and let his other senses take over: the rustling of the breeze through the wheat, the hum of the appliances below, the roughness of the roof shingles under his hands, the smell of soil and hay, the lingering taste of baked apples on his lips. They were like anchors, reminders of the world beneath them.

Finally, Clark spoke. “Now look again.”

He re-opened his eyes, and the scope of it hit him even harder. This world was here, but there were so many others out there in the sky, millions and millions of them.

“It’s hard to believe it’s all _real_ ,” he said.

“It’s _real,_ all right.” Clark’s voice was warm, calm, as if the _realness_ of it all gave everything else meaning. It probably did, for him. How often had he sat here, leaning back just as he was now, thoughts lost in the sky? Had he done it before he even knew that he had come from the stars?

“Your sun… can we see it from here?”

“ _My_ sun? No, you can’t see it.” Clark suddenly dropped his far-off gaze and grinned. “That’s why it’s _night_ right now. You see, the Earth’s _rotation_ —”

“ _Ugh!_ You know what I _mean_.” Dick ignored Clark’s amused chuckles and kicked a Leg of Steel. “ _Krypton’s_ sun.”

Clark leaned on one arm, lined his eyes near Dick’s, and pointed far off to one side, over a small part of the landscape that was interrupted with a silo instead of flat fields. 

“There’s a constellation over there, four stars.” He drew a sort of box, but Dick couldn’t make out which stars he meant, exactly. There were too many. “And Rao…” He pointed to the middle of the box. “…Is right there.”

“Rao?”

“Yeah.” Clark righted himself and bent his knees, leaning back again. “Named after the god of Krypton.”

Dick found himself imitating Clark’s posture, and he self-consciously changed position, bringing his arms around to hug his knees. “Did you learn about that from your Fortress?”

Clark nodded.

How strange it must have been for Clark, older than Dick was now, to find out about a whole other world that he’d come from. Dick shivered thinking about it. At the same time, he sort of envied Clark’s ability to go talk to an artificial-intelligence copy of his father. Dick would have given so much to hear his own father sing again, or to hear his mom tell one of her favorite stories.

“Are there stories about Rao?” Dick asked.

“Oh, sure. Too many to tell in one night. There’s the story of how Rao kindled the red sun and brought life to Krypton. Or there’s the legend of how Cythonna, a terrible goddess, fought a huge war and was exiled into the land of ice. Or—”

“What’s your _favorite_ story?”

“ _My_ favorite,” Clark said, “is actually about two children of Rao, two great dragon-like creatures. Their names would translate to something like… Hm… Nightwing and Flamebird.”

“Ooo.” Dick felt a surge of pride that the figures in such a big legend, Superman’s _favorite_ , had bird names, sort of like him. And flames… well, that wasn’t all too different from Robin’s red and yellow. “Was Flamebird the _coolest_?”

Clark laughed. “Depends how you define _cool_. Flamebird was a force of destruction, incinerating everything, all of Rao’s creations, even Nightwing. Even herself.”

“ _Yeesh_ ,” said Dick. “You didn’t say she was the _bad_ guy.”

“No, no. Flamebird wasn’t _evil_ ,” Clark explained. “The story is that Rao, the Light-Giver, _designed_ Flamebird to be that way, to set everything ablaze. Her fire, like Rao’s, blazed warm and bright, even as it burned away the old remnants of what had come before. So she burned more and more, and the fire grew and grew. But eventually, there was nothing left to fuel the fire. The flames dwindled to embers, and embers to ashes.

“And then,” he continued, “once everything had gone cold and still and dim, Nightwing rose up, reborn from the darkness. He created himself anew, stretched his black wings across the world, and then made new creations, rebuilding everything else that Flamebird had destroyed: the towering spires and yawning chasms, the lush berry-bushes and crawling creatures, and finally, Flamebird herself. And after a generation, the cycle would begin again: the fire, the ash, the darkness, the new life. See, without that destruction, there would be no room for new creation.” 

“Hm,” Dick grunted, unsure what to make of the moral of the story. In his time with Batman, he had heard too many agents of chaos justify themselves with logic like that, pretending that mass violence would be good in some kind of cosmic long run. It was a story _Ra’s_ should tell, not _Clark_. Clark was _better_ than that. Dick bit his lip and pressed the question: “Isn’t that a little… I don’t know… _dark_?”

“You think?” Clark looked at him, eyes gleaming blue even in the night. “I always saw it as a story of _hope_. It’s not too different from what we do here: every spring, if the weather’s right, all these fields get set on fire. The dead stubble from the winter is burned into rich ash, and then we can grow new crops, get a good field like this one. I think on Krypton they pictured Flamebird more like a volcano, but the principle’s the same.” 

Clark turned his attention back to the stars. “Sometimes,” he said, his voice softer, “things end. Their time has come, and it’s just part of the way of the world. Sometimes there are things that even the most powerful hero can’t save. And _sometimes_ there are things that _need_ to end—Ma and Pa told stories like that, too, like Noah and the Flood. But even then, even after the _worst_ destruction, we start over. Even in the darkest darkness, we find our way, and we keep going. We rise up from the ashes of what was lost, and we make something new. And because of that, nothing really ends forever—the end of one story is always the beginning of the next. The fire, the ash, the darkness, the new life.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Dick whispered. He looked out into the vast expanse, where there had once been a thriving planet full of people who told this story, full of people like Clark. Like _Kal-El_. _Once_. _Before_. No wonder the story was a comfort to him.

_Something things end_. _Their time has come_.

But the end of Krypton had been the beginning of Superman.

And was Dick’s own story any different? He wouldn’t have been here at all if not for the fall, if not for the blood-stained dust. And Bruce would never had been Batman, either, without those shots in the alley. He wished Bruce were there with them, to see the stars, to hear the story. Of course, Dick and Bruce had lost everything to cruelty, not to some divine pattern. But then, they had each made their own choices to end their old stories. Dick had said goodbye to his old life and chosen this one. That was a kind of destruction, too, in a way. And then he’d become Robin. _Rising up, reborn from the darkness._

“Maybe we’re all a little bit like Nightwing,” he said, resting his suddenly-heavy head onto Clark’s shoulder. “You, and me, and Bruce.” 

“Yeah,” said Clark. “Yeah, I like to think we are.”


End file.
